Situated in Calgary, Alberta, we're a small woodworking shop dedicated to making artful, functional items for your home.  Our speciality is custom kitchen cutting boards that you can personalize through the use of inlay to make something  uniquely your own.

For the chess player, we also make heirloom-quality chess boards.  All chess boards are made to order, and can take up to 6 weeks to complete.  If you're interested in obtaining a chess board, please contact us.

Why End Grain?

There are generally two types of cutting boards - flat grain (or bread board), and end-grain.  Flat grain is what you see when you look at a table top, where the grain of the wood runs in a horizontal direction.  For furniture, this is usually the best way to present the wood, as well as the strongest.  However, using flat grain for a cutting board is usually not the best solution.

Picture a paint brush with long bristles, and imagine that those bristles are the wood grain.  If you lay the paintbrush flat, you have a good example of what flat grain wood is.  Now imagine using a knife to cut on top of those bristles.  After a while, some of the bristles will start to break off as you cut through them, and over time that nice paint brush will start to show the results of cutting on it.

Those bristles are the same as the wood fibres in a piece of wood.  Constantly cutting across these fibres will eventually cause them to sever, and eventually fall away from the piece of wood, leaving a hole.  for a cutting board, this will leave a void in the wood which can, over time, get larger.  Not to mention that that hole is a perfect place for bacteria to hide.  Definitely not good.

Now take the paintbrush and hold it vertically, with the bristles running up and down.  If you now take a knife and 'cut' down these bristles, they move out of the way, and then move back together when you remove the knife.  This is the same as the wood fibres in an end-grain cutting board.  Cutting down on end-grain will not cut the fibres, but rather move between them.

This is why end-grain cutting boards last much longer than flat grain cutting board.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule: if you're planning on using a bread-board type cutting board for display purposes (for example, as a serving tray), then there's no issue.

But if you plan on cutting on a board, there is no better substitute than end-grain.